Before she arrived in this mecca of migrant labor at age 48, Evelyn Naces, a Filipino nurse, had never owned a credit card. Soon she had 14 of them — and like thousands of other foreign workers here, a trip to debtors’ prison.
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Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
The Philippine Embassy held a financial literacy program in June. Some workers borrowed at rates of 50 percent or more.
“When they put me in shackles, that was the worst,” said Ms. Naces, who had $27,000 in unpaid bills, mostly from helping her grown son start a business back in the Philippines that later failed. “I felt so degraded.”
For years, banks all but threw credit cards at the foreigners who come here in droves to work the malls and fill the office towers. The workers, many of them raised in poor countries and new to easy credit, spent beyond their means. Staggering losses followed, with jail terms common for those who could not pay.
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